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Saturday, 1 March 2014

Why I don't have an iPad (anymore)

A Cautionary Tale :}
In truth, what on earth did I NEED an iPad for? The lovely iMac with the uber-big screen serves me very well and as I don't go out much, do I need to take technology with me? As I'm probably one of the last people on the planet not using Twitter or Facebook there is no need to be connected to the ether all the time.

But sometimes need has nothing to do with it and I sorted of hankered .... Management always encourages me when I'm dithering around like this and eventually I said 'sod it' and placed an order on Monday. Of course, at Bag End nothing is simple - the iMac is still happily running Snow Leopard (if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and I've had no need to upgrade) but without Mavericks you can't synch via iCloud. And that's why I spent much of Tuesday trying to persuade an old Seagate drive to become a bootable backup of my Mac hard disk before I faced a 5GB download of a new operating system. I failed but that's down in the noise.

Shiny new toy was delivered Wednesday morning and as it was too wet to work outside I spent all morning playing. There was a lot to learn, Apps to download, bla bla bla.

By midday I was so ill I couldn't manage lunch, head that felt like it was in a vice, nausea so bad I really wanted to be sick, couldn't see straight with or without glasses, unable to concentrate. After wondering if my blood glucose was seriously out of whack (it wasn't) the awful truth dawned - I had motion sickness.

I know this is something I suffer from badly, can't even sit on a rocking chair or garden swing but I never expected a small, hand-held computer to make me ill (although thinking about it, I find the movement in the Apple 'Time Manager' application pretty unsettling). A few minutes with Google revealed the awful truth - a known problem with iOS 7 and not one that could go away at anytime in the future, and the only "fix" of Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion and dimming the screen wasn't enough for me. The rest of Wednesday was spent crashed out feeling like sh*t.

Thursday morning I felt fine, and reckoned the iPad and I would be OK because normally I'd never spend quite so long playing with it in one session. Wrong. I picked it up and checked the weather forecast for about three minutes. Instant nausea, if I'd had any breakfast it is likely I would have lost it.

Later that day I had an interesting conversation with Apple's Tech Support guys in Ireland. The first chap reckoned he had never heard of the problem but was sympathetic and it wasn't long before I spoke to someone else. Who clearly DID know about the issue because I didn't even have to say more than "I've got a £xxx paperweight that I can't use, so can you please help me" and he'd arranged a full refund and a courier to collect the device.

Whilst I'm deeply disappointed that Apple's latest technology is never going to be something I can use, you cannot fault the customer service and speed of fixing the issue. What is more bothersome (for me) is what happens next. The future of computing is swoosh, slide, glide, zoom, twirl . . . and I can't help but be a little concerned about how much of it will be completely inaccessible to me.

If you want a bargain unused iPad with 128GB of storage then check out the 'refurbished' section of the Apple Store in a couple of weeks.